3dbrows

> “butt” is a feature in payroll land

Cloud-to-butt extension? :D

Great initiative; UK payroll systems are indeed a mess. Wishing you the best of luck - you clearly have the skills and experience to make a success of this clear gap in the market. I’m familiar with Monzo’s engineering and cultural standards, and hope you carry those to this startup too.

Yes. It’s a nice anecdote to have :)

I am two handshakes removed both from John von Neumann and Alan Turing (via different people) and wish even 0.001% of their genius was thereby transmissible.

There are plenty of people still alive with handshake distances of 1 or 0, however, if we’re making a metric out of that.

Reminds me of this GitHub incident: https://github.blog/2021-03-18-how-we-found-and-fixed-a-rare...

Understanding cloud costs is an area Infracost (YC 2021) is working on. Give it a Terraform script and it will calculate the dollar cost; it can also diff costs in a CI pipeline: https://www.infracost.io/

That is amazing, thank you. Seeing as IBM trivia is perhaps of interest to you, you might like to know that the extreme last vestige of IBM Greenock closed in Dec 2018, when the railway station attached to the plant closed. It served only an eerie, deserted brownfield site by its end. I once tried visiting to go dumpster diving for old keyboards, but there was nothing around and demolition was nearly complete. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_railway_station

Do you happen to know if the design or build quality has changed much under new ownership?

There are probably several dozen of us reading this thread who are still using ancient Model Ms. I have a Greenock-made UK model (built 1988-11-15) which feels indestructible. The Greenock IBM factory closed down years ago, sadly, so there won't be any more coming from there. The factory has been the site of some interesting urban exploration. [1][2]

[1] https://www.28dayslater.co.uk/threads/ibm-greenock-dec-2008....

[2] https://imgur.com/gallery/SZZ5z

Thank you, do you happen to have a link?

At the time of writing (2020-11-09 12:04 UTC) the article uses "90% of people" and "90% protection" interchangeably. I assume it means "90% of individuals achieve immunity", rather than "individuals achieve 90% immunity".

EDIT: See child comment re: Pfizer press release.

EDIT 2: See [1] for said press release, which has more detailed information than the BBC article.

[1] https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/press-release-det...

My only recent comparison is with Virgin Media, whom I'm sure we both agree has awful support.

Perhaps I should look into Zen. They are the other one I hear good things about. AAISP does have a 300GB monthly limit (extensible for a fee) but I've never exhausted it, even with two people WFH and nightly TV streaming.

AAISP have strong principles of privacy and not interfering in connections. (No NXDOMAIN web page injection, for example.) Also, exceptionally advanced line monitoring tooling and configuration - they let you see telecoms-engineer metrics and parameters about your line, for what that's worth.

The price I quoted includes line rental btw.

AAISP has an excellent product. Their sales team wasn't the easiest to deal with (pretty brusque in my experience), but in the ~15 months I've been with them, the connection has been rock-solid and never throttled. You do pay for it though (£45/month bottom line for ~75Mbps).

I believe Netcraft still produce this sort of report on a monthly basis and use it to record (among other things) the relative popularity of webservers. At least, they did when I worked there many moons ago; and they monetised such technology. Biggest hurdle isn't the software or execution time: rather, it's making an agreement with your ISP/hosting company wherein they allow you to portscan the entire internet on a regular basis without flagging it as abuse.

> It is amazing how much we regress as software gets bloated with feature creep.

Yes. This week I set up a new Windows 10 laptop for an elderly gentleman, who wanted to continue to play the classic Solitaire game. I eventually found the edition that shipped with Windows 3.0 and installed that. I then tried some of the standard Microsoft free games you get now and had a poor experience:

Horribly slow to load. Advertisements in your face constantly. Demands that you "sign in" to Xbox Live. Not having internet connectivity is treated as weird. Noisy user interface; multiple clicks to start a game.

Compare this with the old-fashioned games e.g. Solitaire, Minesweeper:

Loads instantly, ready to play. No advertisements, connectivity requirements, or user data harvesting. Even the simple graphics add an aesthetic all of their own, but that of course is a subjective opinion.

I agree with you.

Thank you!

Tindeco Financial Services AG | Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom | Partially REMOTE | Full-time | https://www.tindecofs.com/

Tindeco seeks senior C# developers for our innovative Vision Investments product, which automates portfolio optimization. Experience in software development from a financial services or quantitative background is an advantage. Our stack is primarily C# .NET Core 3.1 and F#, deployed on Kubernetes. As a primarily Microsoft shop, our stack also includes WinForms, WPF, ASP .NET Web API and SQL Server, but knowledge of these are optional. We also use React in the frontend.

We are looking for people with a passion to work in FinTech, a willingness to learn and most importantly a strong desire to tackle interesting and complicated problems. Our software is multi-award-winning at the Swiss WealthBriefing awards. We are a small but established company with ambitious growth plans over the next 12 months. Remote working is an option, but will not be 100% of the time once the COVID-19 situation ends (we value face-to-face interaction), so please do not be too far from Edinburgh.

For more details please introduce yourself with your CV (resumé) by emailing careers AT tindecofs.com.

I think this is fantastic. I can see your investment pitch being "the HackerRank/LeetCode of devops". I've only tried one scenario (DNS) so far but it seems well done, not too long, not too easy, not too hard. I am excited to try it out further.

First I'll address your questions and then add some comments of my own.

1. I do a lot of technical interviewing. Many people can _sound_ like they know what they're talking about, but it can be a struggle to get to the nitty gritty to really test their understanding. This product seems to have an angle of "take-home tests as a service", which is cool. Over time I can see how you could come to have a large library of scenarios and use of them would be very helpful in filtering candidates for real, demonstrable competence.

2. I like it. I once tried a DIY approach involving having candidates talk to a Kafka server I provided, with client certificates. It was cumbersome. There was a 100% overlap of candidates who succeeded and candidates who could be bothered to take the test at all. From this I gathered that the mere existence of the test was a strong filter, but it's also fair to say that judging test difficulty level well is extremely hard. (In other words: "oh no, he wants me to actually understand how to use client certs? Bye.")

3. Pre-interview. Async hiring process with just-in-time candidate attention means the team does not lose too much productivity (as much as hiring is a valuable use of time, developer time in a small company is at a premium).

Some quick-fire minor comments: consider making it easier to share the test link (I generated it on my phone, wanted to run on my desktop); the password field is before the username; it wasn't super obvious that different VMs were in play between the warmup and real scenario, nor that a scenario could involve multiple VMs itself. Also, you've no doubt thought of this, but have good defences against abuse of your VMs. By the way, have you considered this approach [1] to VMs? More controllable, but less realistic.

Some questions/suggestions:

1. As the test admin I'd love to to provide "verify.sh" to grade the test using logic I specify. My script would test, for example, "Can this VM now reach host X?" "Is command Y in the bash history?" and dump out a report somewhere. -- What ideas do you have for auto-marking?

2. What revenue model do you have in mind?

3. How ready is this for real-life use in a hiring pipeline?

4. Do you think there is future scope for a customer to specify their own scenarios, or is the idea more that you build up a library of them?

5. Have an advanced mode where the candidate must supply a public key to you for SSH access, rather than password. Boom, you've filtered for a basic understanding of public key cryptography.

6. I am not sure the user flow currently has a clear distinction between "recruiter view" and "candidate view" but no doubt that is on the roadmap.

7. Scenario idea: certificate expiry blocking secure comms between hosts. This happens in K8S clusters often enough. Could be replicated here.

8. Just from curiosity, any details you can share about how the stack works? What am I talking to, a docker-compose script of Centos containers? You've done a nice job with the SSH user routing; am I being tunnelled through your jumpbox to the target machine/container?

That's a lot, sorry! I think this is an exciting idea and that you guys are on to something.

[1] https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/qemu-monitor-socket-rce-vnc

Have you seen TimescaleDB? https://www.timescale.com/

Tindeco Financial Services AG | Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom | Partially REMOTE | Full-time | https://www.tindecofs.com/

Tindeco seeks a lead software architect for our innovative Vision Investments product. Significant experience in software development from a financial services or quantitative background is required. Our stack is primarily C# .NET Core 3.1 and F#, deployed on Kubernetes. As a primarily Microsoft shop, our stack also includes WinForms, WPF, ASP .NET Web API and SQL Server. We also use Go, React, Typescript and Bootstrap.

We are looking for people with a passion to work in FinTech, a willingness to learn and most importantly a strong desire to tackle interesting and complicated problems. Our software is multi-award-winning at the Swiss WealthBriefing awards. We are a small but established company with ambitious growth plans over the next 12 months. Remote working is an option, but will not be 100% of the time once lockdown ends (we value face-to-face interaction).

More details from Steve via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-6654467380732841984-... or find a contact email on our website.

Personally I find that subreddit is a cringeworthy series of posts wherein people go overboard with Glaswegian patterns of speech and then label it "Scots". I wouldn't regard it as a reference for how people actually talk.

It's folk in the west who lack airs and graces who say it all the time.

No true Scotsman would use such language so casually. ;-)